The present invention relates in general to the cleaning of furnace walls, and in particular to a new and useful method of controlling one or more water, steam, air, or combination thereof cleaning devices, for cleaning particularly reflective and tenacious ash from the furnace walls.
While the technique of soot blowing, using air or steam, for cleaning ash from the walls of a furnace are known, these measures are not effective against the type of white tenacious ash which coats the walls of a furnace when burning certain Western fuels such as Powder River Basin coals. The use of water lances may be necessary to remove this type of deposit, so as to return good heat exchange efficiency to the walls of the furnace.
A variety of sensors or monitors are known which can be utilized to sense and measure near infrared emissions, such as those which represent heat within a furnace or other heated process enclosure. See for example, U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,539,588 and 4,690,634.